Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1998"

Dressing up: clothing, class and gender in post-abolition zanzibar

Abstract: Pemba PerembaUkija na winda, hutoka na kilembaUkija na kilemba, hutoka na winda.(Proceed cautiously in PembaIf you come wearing a loin cloth, you leave wearing a turbanIf you come wearing a turban, you leave wearing a loin cloth.)Dress has historically been used as one of the most important and visually immediate markers of class, status and ethnicity in East African coastal society. As one of many forms of expressive culture, clothing practice shaped and gave form to social bodies. Examining transformations in dress and fashion illustrates, however, that boundaries between theoretically distinctive social categories were often vague in practice.

Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870-1918

Abstract: In the memory of older residents of the southern highlands of Tanzania, the term 'Maji Maji' embraces an extended period of conflict and population dispersal. Maji Maji is remembered as a complex of political interactions that extended from the late precolonial period through the rebellion's aftermath. These narratives relocate the history of Maji Maji in the larger context of political alliances and authority in the southern highlands. African leaders had used strategic alliances throughout the nineteenth century to establish mutual obligations for military assistance and trade. As territorial politics expanded after 1860, alliances acquired further importance as leaders sought to establish and protect their emerging authority. When European traders and explorers began to travel into this region, they entered into alliance relationships with local leaders. German missionaries and military authorities continued to pursue alliances during the establishment of colonial rule. This larger context for the study of Maji Maji illuminates the role of ethnicity and gender in the rebellion and its aftermath. The groups which reacted to German rule were not consolidated or bounded entities. Their cohesion was determined by internal tensions of allegiance as well as the external politics of alliance. The experience of conflict in the southern highlands was also gendered. Women were centrally important to the politics of alliance and authority as their labor formed the foundation for the expansion of kinship and agrarian accumulation in the later nineteenth century. The aftermath of Maji Maji was characterized by famine, the result of the 'scorched earth' policy of the German troops. The politics of famine realigned the landscape of authority and alliance in the southern highlands. Mission stations, government headquarters and the settlements of loyalist chiefs became new centers of protection and patronage for dispersed populations.

Imperial concerns and 'women's affairs' : State efforts to regulate clitoridectomy and eradicate abortion in Meru, Kenya, c.1910-1950

Abstract: This paper analyzes campaigns to regulate clitoridectomy and eradicate abortion in Kenya during the colonial period revealing the contradictory and gendered nature of the colonial states attempt to comply with the "moral obligations" of imperial rule while securing local political control. The paper reviews administrative concerns and knowledge during the period 1910-28 describes the initiation practices through the lens of local remembrance and ethnographic fragments and reviews colonial opposition to clitoridectomy and abortion. The "female circumcision controversy" peaked in 1929-31 when missionaries gained support for a ban on the more severe forms of excision but failed to have this ban written into the 1930 penal code. The paper then looks at attempts of Local Native Councils to regulate clitoridectomy during the period 1925-34 and at attempts during 1929-51 to eradicate abortion by lowering the age of female initiation reducing the time when an uncircumcised girl could engage in premarital sexual activity and risk an unacceptable pregnancy that would end in abortion. The next section describes how efforts to enforce early initiation included mass excisions under police supervision which disrupted the timing and sequence of initiation and courtship and undermined a practice that gendered personhood and sustained generational authority. While perhaps preventing some abortions this process enabled males to subvert womens traditional authority.

Women, marginality and the Zulu State : Women's institutions and power in the early nineteenth century

Abstract: For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has been dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history of women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged gender relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct women's history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses of the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes in the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society, even during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane in the early nineteenth century.More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa. Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective and of focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction among them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted their position and were contented’. In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in the new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition of traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also hides dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those relations are and have been.

Caste and class in historical north-west ethiopia: the beta israel (falasha) and kemant, 1300–1900

Abstract: This article compares the histories of two small groups in north-western Ethiopia between about 1300 and 1900. It explores the development of separate identities by the Beta Israel (Falasha) and the Kemant peoples from an orginal common. Agaw-speaking base during three time periods in Ethiopian history: the centralizing state to 1632; the urban-centered state, 1632-1755; and the regionalized but re-centralizing state, 1755-1900. It argues that the key variable in explaining the historical development of these two groups was their differential relationship to the Ethiopian state. During this six hundred year period, Beta Israel resisted conquest, were partially incorporated into the broader society, but ultimately maintained a high degree of social separation in an essentially caste relationship with the dominant society and state. This separation allowed the group to refashion their identity again in the twentieth century: between the 1970s and 1991 virtually all Beta Israel separated completely from Ethiopia by emigrating to Israel. In contrast, Keman did not resist the original royal incursion into the region beginning in the fourteenth century. Unlike Beta Israel, they tried to maintain their identity through a process of accommodation and withdrawal up to the mid-nineteenth century. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, however, their society has experienced strong pressures from the dominant society and state, leading to the loss of their cultural distinctiveness and their incorporation into the overall class system of the region. These two cases, thus, illustrate some to the processes by which north-western Ethiopia became a traditional Amhara area.

Midwifery training and female circumcision in the inter-war anglo-egyptian sudan

Abstract: Contrary to the popular vision, most practitioners of Western medicine in Africa during the colonial period were non-Europeans, usually African medical auxiliaries with varying amounts of training. This paper seeks to refine views of colonial medicine by investigating the training and work of one such group of medical personnel. The Midwifery Training School (MTS), opened in Omdurman, Sudan in 1921, created a class of modern trained Sudanese midwives out of, and in rivalry to, an entrenched class of traditional midwives. The interaction between Western and traditional medicine and between British and Sudanese societies in the context of midwifery training and practice was highly complex and constantly being negotiated. In their construction of respectability in potential pupils, their choice of language in lectures, their strategies for licensing traditional and trained midwives, and their approach to female circumcision, the British women who ran the MTS, Mabel and Gertrude Wolff, were constantly negotiating with Sudanese culture and encountering the limits of British colonial (medical) power. While midwifery training and practice incorporated the Wolff sisters and Sudanese midwives into the work of the colonial state, they remained marginalized within that state, denied authority, status and remuneration, on account of their gender, class and occupation. A discussion of the Sudan government's position on female circumscision supports these arguments, highlighting the Wolffs' simultaneous willingness to accomodate and modify Sudanese custom, as well as the marginalization of both medicine and midwifery within government.

Midwives and medical men in the cape colony before 1860

Abstract: Relatively little research has been done on the history of midwifery at the Cape, although there has lately been increasing interest in the social history of medicine, as well as in the history of abortion, rape, infanticide and motherhood in South Africa. One of the reasons for the dearth of research is the relative absence of women, especially black women, from the historical record. The archival record of what was called the Cape Colony during the early nineteenth century is rich enough to reveal something about women's history, however. The Cape was first settled by Europeans in 1652 under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), and was captured by the British in 1795 and again in 1806. During the first half-century of British rule at the Cape, urban midwives came under greater professional and official scrutiny and left some traces in the historical archive. The remaining absences tell their own stories, too, and in this paper these silences will be made to speak, if only softly and tentatively, of the role of women in colonial African medical care.

Eva's men: gender and power in the establishment of the cape of good hope, 1652–74

Abstract: This article offers a fresh interpretation of the life of Krotoa/Eva, the famous Khoena interpreter of Jan Van Riebeeck, whose gender gave her a unique position in relation to both Dutch and Khoena society. It appears that her own people sent her to work for the Dutch as a young girl, both to serve as a token of goodwill, to gain prestige as the protegee of the household of a powerful leader and to become familiar with Dutch ways. The Dutch received her comfortably as a servant, child minder and companion for Van Riebeeck's young nieces. When Eva learned Dutch expertly, she quickly became their most trusted interpreter. The evidence also hints at an especially close and sensitive, possibly sexual, relationship between her and Van Riebeeck. When military conflicts left Eva identified as a Dutch collaborator, she contacted her sister's husband, chief Oedasoa. Her direct mediation enabled the Dutch to open up a profitable new trading enterprise with Oedasoa, who in turn used Eva as his personal agent within the Dutch community. Her unique position attracted the attention of a bright young employee of the Company, Pieter Van Meerhoff, who became her lover soon after his arrival at the Cape in 1659. Pieter became actively involved in northern expeditions of exploration and prided himself on his sensitivity and capacity to get on well with various Khoena chiefs. Eva continued as an interpreter, intermediary with Oedasoa and the couple had two children together. Eva and Pieter married only after Van Riebeeck left the Cape. Their decision to conform to the norms of Dutch society disappointed Oedasoa who had offered them enough livestock to establish an independent lifestyle but brought both much higher levels of respect from the Dutch, including significant promotions for Pieter. When Pieter was killed in I666, heading up a trading mission to Mauritius, Eva's life sharply deteriorated. She died in I674, accused of having become a drunken pest and prostitute. Eva's story

Meroe and the sudanic kingdoms

Abstract: The kingdom of Kush (Meroe) represents one of a series of early states located within the Middle Nile. At its greatest extent controlling more than 1,000 km. of the Nile valley from northern Lower Nubia to Sennar on the Blue Nile, its scale, longevity and cultural achievements are remarkable (Fig. 1). While its origins in the early millennium b.c. and its demise around the fourth century a.d. still remain obscure, it is one of the earliest and most impressive states yet found south of the Sahara. This notwithstanding, the place of the Kushite state and its civilization within the history of sub-Saharan Africa remains far from clear.The early development of complex societies in the Middle Nile within the frontiers of the modern republic of Sudan raises many questions concerning the role of external influences and cultural contacts on the region. The ever present shadow of Pharaonic Egypt looms large in most studies, and very close links are still maintained between Meroitic (and Nubian) studies and Egyptology. One result of the undoubted Egyptocentrism which has for so long dominated research in the region has been the neglect of many research areas likely to be of interest to archaeologists and historians working elsewhere in Africa. The political structuring and organisation of power within the Kushite state still remain little studied, while little interest has been shown in trying to contextualize it, either in relation to later kingdoms of the Middle Nile or indeed in the history of state development in Sudanic Africa as a whole. All too often it seems still implied, if not explicitly stated, that the early development of social/political complexity in the region, with the rise of Kerma, Napata and Meroe and their attendant cultural achievements, may be largely explained by, and understood in terms of, Egyptian models: ‘secondary states’ on the margins of a great civilization, unique within, and effectively unconnected with, other regions of sub-Saharan Africa.The concern of this paper is briefly to reassess a number of questions concerning our perceptions of the Kushite state, which also have implications for our understanding of the long-term history of early states within the Middle Nile and their relation to other parts of Sudanic Africa.

Unsettled accounts : Stool debts, chieftaincy disputes and the question of asante constitutionalism

Abstract: In a recent study, Fred Cooper argues that strikes and other forms of labor protest had a clarifying effect on official thinking not only about labor policies but also about the aims and, ultimately, the viability of colonial rule. As Africans went on strike, from the Copperbelt to the docks of Mombasa and the Gold Coast Railway, to demand better wages and working conditions, colonial administrators first envisioned and then embraced the idea of an African working class and the possibility that African workers could be managed with the same kinds of labor codes and social welfare policies that obtained in Europe.Of course, the image of a working class applied only so far in Africa. Colonial officials never fully understood the way African workers lived or the place of wage employment in African society, and were dismayed when their newly acquired understanding of Africans as universal workers was challenged in the 1950s by former strike leaders who began to insist on Africans' rights to political autonomy. Nonetheless, as Cooper shows, the effects of recurrent, often highly effective, strikes were far-reaching. As officials confronted the financial and political implications of providing all Africans with social welfare benefits and economic development comparable to those of Europe, they decided it was time to abandon the imperial enterprise.

Blantyre transformed: Class, conflict and nationalism in urban Malawi

Abstract: This article seeks to relate the character and changing circumstances of Blantyre-Limbe from the 1940s to the post-war emergence of a labour movement in the town and its tangled relationship with Malawian nationalism. Blantyre from its origins was a radically segregated town, organised on South African lines, but providing housing in locations for only a small proportion of the workers employed. Most workers, in consequence, were non-migrants, living in villages fringing the town that were relatively free from colonial control. Most of the villagers were exceptionally poor but a minority seized the opportunity the expansion of markets provided to become self-employed businessmen. It is argued that these features influenced the character of the labour movement which developed in the late 1940s, a time of urban growth, rising prices and, initially, labour shortages. Workers' protests took place in a variety of industries, but particularly among railway workers, who differed from the majority in being housed in a company location where they could develop some sense of worker solidarity, and also among lorry drivers who took the lead in forming a trade union. Leaders of this union, notably Laurence Makata, exemplified the socially ambiguous character of workers living in a semi-rural environment. Several made the transition from wage earner to independent businessman while at the same time expanding their links with the urban poor through the construction of ties of patronage. These different responses influenced worker-nationalist relations from the late-1950s. This was a period in which rising unemployment interacted with increased political expectations to stimulate a new wave of worker agitation. Makata, like other businessmen anxious to break the expatriate stranglehold over the transportation of cash crops, played an important role in mobilising urban support for Congress. Labour leaders, however, tended to keep their distance from the nationalists although shari

Settlers, the state and colonial power: the colonization of queen adelaide province, 1834–37

Abstract: Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of Rarabe Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May 1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth century. Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape. However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape as a whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories of George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately thwarted by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this is seen as a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for his own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded upon settler-led conquest and dispossession.

Islam and the construction of social identity in the nineteenth-century sahara

Abstract: Early in the twentieth century, French and British colonial scholars developed rigid, descent-based models of African pastoral societies. These models emphasized stasis partly because the scholars relied on unrepresentative samples of the pastoralists' views of their own societies, and partly because the scholars simply misinterpreted data. By the 1970s anthropologists had radically revised these models, arguing that although pastoralists generally defined themselves in terms of descent, their societies were nevertheless quite dynamic. In their view, descent was an idiom of social discourse; while pastoral societies may have operated according to the idiom in the past, the economic changes brought about by colonialism had ruptured the connection between the ideology and social practice. More recently, historians have begun to argue that pastoral societies were also dynamic before colonialism, and that there was great flexibility in the ways pastoralists reckoned social identities.This essay draws on evidence from the nineteenth-century western Sahara to argue that pastoral societies were dynamic long before the colonial period, and that many Saharans perceived their society in this way. This evidence was neglected by the early colonial scholars and many post-colonial anthropologists in favor of those descriptions that emphasized stasis. Saharan accounts that described social dynamism were often based on the explicitly Islamic model of the Prophet Muhammad and his diverse community of supporters. This model, then and throughout Islamic history, has offered the possibility of social improvement, and therein lies the explanation for why some Saharans interpreted society as static while others saw it as dynamic. Social models that fix groups into specific ranks according to descent serve the interests of those at the higher ranks, while dynamic models serve to legitimize social mobility.

Limba 'Deep Rural' Strategies

Abstract: The Upper Guinea Coast of West Africa was incorporated within the Atlantic economy at an early date. While the historical literature on this region tends to emphasize local entrepreneurship and adaptability, recent studies on globalization/ modernity have also cited cases where crises of trust and identity in global social systems engender a renewed search for local moral communities. This article considers whether the Limba of northern Sierra Leone may represent such a case in the Upper Guinea Coast historical context. The Limba have often been considered as one of the most deeply autochthonous 'peoples' of the region. The alternative interpretation put forward in this article is that the Limba may represent a 'deep rural' society: an enclave found on the margins of metropolitan society, whose occupants, periodically replenished from outside, consciously seek to maintain their freedom from institutional metropolitan cultural constraints. The article focuses on Biriwa, a pre-colonial Limba polity whose rulers, probably of Mandingo origin, appear to have been instrumental in the creation of a 'Limba' enclave from diverse human resources. The importance of rice production in the Limba economy, and its relation to historical Konte control over rituals concerning rainfall, is also considered.

The ganda on lake victoria: a nineteenth- century east african imperialism

Abstract: In the nineteenth century, Ganda developed a fleet of canoes designed to extend their military power and to control the increasingly lucrative trade routes linking the lake region with the coast. Naval construction increased rapidly from the I840s onward, partly in response to the gradual decline of the army on land and, in mercantilist fashion, partly to secure Ganda commercial interests within the theatre of long-distance trading operations. The two were not unconnected, as trade brought firearms to the kingdom, a commodity increasingly, if mistakenly, seen as essential to a revival in Ganda military fortunes. Canoe-building was the most dramatic example of the ways in which the Buganda state utilized its human and material resources - most notably those on the Sesse islands - and also reflected a continuing expansionist drive straddling several reigns. The systematic attempt to control Lake Victoria with these ends in mind was in itself a remarkable endeavour, clearly illustrating the political, economic and social dynamics that had enabled Ganda society to become one of the most successful in the pre-colonial era. However, the success of the naval programme was extremely varied; although Buganda was the dominant lacustrine power and carried more trade on Lake Victoria than any of its rivals, there were critical weaknesses in both naval organization and strategy. While Ganda vessels could move with virtual impunity in the western and southern areas of the lake, far beyond their territorial waters, they were unable to pacify the northern lake shore and islands, such as Buvuma, closer to home. The pace with which Ganda attempted to tie ancient fishing communities to military and commercial activity led to uncertainty in naval strategy and the ruthless exploitation of Sesse labour that, in the long term, failed to create a motivated naval industry.

Fortunes commerciales a shingîti (adrar mauritanien) au dix-neuvième siècle

Abstract: A Shingiti, a partir du milieu du dix-neuvieme siecle, se constituent, dans les tribus qsuriennes, de grandes fortunes fondees sur le commerce dont on presente ici deux exemples, chez les Ahl Habut (createurs de la grande bibliotheque qui illustre encore la ville) et les Ahl Muhammed Mahmud, tous deux de la tribu des Aqhlâl. Ces fortunes s'elaborent sur la base du transport caravanier et impliquent un developpement de l'elevage chamelier, mais aussi de la production locale du sel (Idjil) et des dattes, celle-ci entrainant a son tour une utilisation croissante de la main d'oeuvre esclavagiste. Ce mouvement economique est replace dans le contexte saharien regional domine par l'inscription croissante dans le marche mondial par l'intermediaire du sud-marocain et du Senegal. L'influence des tribus 'marocaines', Tekna et Awlâd Bu sba c est mise en evidence, dans le domaine des methodes commerciales en particulier. La reorganisation des courants caravaniers sur la base de ce que Faidherbe appelle le 'cabotage' est enfin soulignee: ramification des routes commerciales, multiplication des produits traites, developpement du marche, effets sur la production saharienne et sur la structure sociale.

‘NO NEED...TO THINK OF HOME’? MASCULINITY AND DOMESTIC LIFE ON THE NIGERIAN RAILWAY, c . 1940–61

Abstract: Drawing on a study of predominantly Yoruba railway workers based in southwestern Nigeria from the late I930s to the early I960s, this essay examines the views of masculinity and domesticity that circulated within wage earners' communities and probes the links between family life and industrial relations. As the largest category of wage workers, railwaymen helped to create new domestic forms in Nigeria because of their steady incomes, the constraints of their employment and their proximity to the reach of the colonial state/employer. Many of them came to their jobs in order to marry, build houses or create patronage relations. Over time, though, their spending diverged from these older patterns. Wives made active claims on their incomes for domestic maintenance, so that such contributions came to be seen as less and less discretionary. Their households experienced more marital stability and resource pooling than others in the same era, leading many career workers to see themselves as primary family providers. Tight domestic budgets and increasing time spent away, from the hometown helped to loosen railwaymen's ties with their natal communities, although many formed urban and work-based patronage networks. Nigerian railway workers were not passive objects of colonial policies. Their gender ideologies and domestic arrangements were altered both because the labor process was transformed and because such modifications suited the life strategies of individual men and women. Furthermore, even as they adapted in response to new circumstances, they attempted to impose their visions of gender and family life upon the labor process. Metropolitan-encouraged ideals of male breadwinners and dependent wives held sway in some contexts, but they coexisted with a variety of practices and considerable discussion about the nexus between labor and home life. By the early I960s, as Nigerians began to build an independent country, wage earners grappled with questions of national developm

Research in saharan history

Abstract: Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850. By JAMES L. A. WEBB JR. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Pp. xxvi+227. £40.95 (ISBN 0-299-14330-9); £17.95, paperback (ISBN 0-299-14334-1). In contrast to the desert itself, the Sahara as subject of historical (re)construction is currently displaying signs of health and vitality. It is enticing historians into a range of theoretical and methodological domains deriving from other disciplines, and simultaneously attracting scholars from other disciplines to play out their own explorations around its contours. For a space which seems to have no difficulty occupying well-delineated and identified areas in every genre of cartographical representation, the Sahara is surprisingly difficult to ‘locate’ in academic discourse. Its identity, in current parlance, is a popular focus of speculation and debate, challenging conventional notions of its location, both in time and in space. One of these challenges is engagingly articulated in the recent publication of economic historian James Webb Jr. His Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850, invites wider participation in this ‘search for the Sahara’ and in so doing, encourages broader understanding of just where ‘Saharan studies’ and in particular Saharan history and Saharan society stand in these so-called post-colonial times.

Romantic revolutionaries: david ivon jones, s. p. bunting and the origins of non-racial politics in south africa

Abstract: The Delegate for Africa: David Ivon Jones, 1883–1924. By Baruch Hirson and Gwyn A. Williams. London: Core Publications, 1995. Pp. x+272. £8.50, paperback (ISBN 897640-02-1). S. P. Bunting: A Political Biography, new edition. By Edward Roux. Bellville: Mayibuye Books. 1993. Pp. 200. No price given, paperback (ISBN 1-86808-162-1). Outsiders looking at the recent history of South African politics are apt to be struck by two conundrums. How can a nation that pushed the logic of ‘race’ as far as any society in history also have produced one of the world's most enduring non-racial political traditions? And how, in a period that has seen the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of communist parties throughout the world, has the South African Communist Party (SACP) not only survived but risen to power, in coalition with the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions?